Re-coloured textures in some wads

[RHhe82]

This might be a stupid question, but some wads (such as the Stardate 20x6/7) have what it seems to me some sort of recoloured textures and sprites.

 

I was wondering how is that done: have the authors really gone through a painstaking process of altering all the textures by hand, and more over, altering some of the sprites (powerups, enemies…) and all their frames with some image editing software? It sounds like such a chore. (Then again, the wads I’m thinking of already must have demanded a lot of work by their authors, what’s a little graphical tinkering compared to that if it perfects the experience…)

 

Or is it done thru some modern source port magics or something of the sort? When I see some people playing them, it looks like even the advanced hud colours (PrBoom+, DSDA) have changed accordingly, which makes me suspect this magic option.

[ViolentBeetle]

SLADE (And I assume real image editors) has built-in functional to replace ranges of colours. Doom's palette is mostly logically arranged, so taking all reds and replacing them with all greens would be easy. It can also colorize greyscale images effectively.

Failing that, graphical editors have more sophisticated colorization tools, though how they'd map onto a limited palette I'm not sure.

[RHhe82]

2 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

SLADE (And I assume real image editors) has built-in functional to replace ranges of colours. Doom's palette is mostly logically arranged, so taking all reds and replacing them with all greens would be easy. It can also colorize greyscale images effectively.

Failing that, graphical editors have more sophisticated colorization tools, though how they'd map onto a limited palette I'm not sure.

 

Cool! I tried SLADE, adding a PLAYPAL entry into a wad file. Is that the thing to do? My tweaking of it had not-so-beautiful results, but at least it had results.

[ViolentBeetle]

34 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

 

Cool! I tried SLADE, adding a PLAYPAL entry into a wad file. Is that the thing to do? My tweaking of it had not-so-beautiful results, but at least it had results.

No, PLAYPAL is the palette for the whole game. If you don't know what it is, just have it borrowed from IWAD.

Open the texture and you'll see some colored squares and arrows above preview where you can remap colors or colorize.

[RHhe82]

37 minutes ago, ViolentBeetle said:

No, PLAYPAL is the palette for the whole game. If you don't know what it is, just have it borrowed from IWAD.

Open the texture and you'll see some colored squares and arrows above preview where you can remap colors or colorize.

 

Okay, so you do need to modify individual assets (for example, FWATER1-4 each to have strangely coloured water), SLADE just makes it relatively easy and quick once you figure out how you should transform the pallette?

Edited December 19, 2021 by RHhe82
Added "relatively"...

[ViolentBeetle]

Pretty much, yes.

[Burgish]

If you use the right click menu you can actually do a palette transform on multiple items at once.  Right click any of the selected items and go to Graphic -> Color Remap, and that should open the palette transform window.

Don't forget to save your palette transformation in case you need it again later!

[ChopBlock223]

What I do is exporting the graphics and then just alter them in Photoshop, for just recolors this is usually easy, though you may want to try a few different hues, and try to make the colors fit the palette that you're working with (which is typically the regular Doom palette, unless you're doing something custom).

 

I tend to just eyeball it and usually it turns out right after the first or second attempt.